With the advent of digital content players and other types of mobile computing devices, people are accumulating vast libraries of digital content. In many cases, personal content libraries include songs, movies, etc., added from physical media such as CD, SACD, and DVD as well as content downloaded from online content retailers. While mobile computing devices allow users to enjoy their content virtually anywhere, growing content libraries are becoming more and more difficult to effectively manage. One common way users attempt to effectively manage their content library is to create a playlist consisting of a set of content items selected by a user to be performed in a specified order.
Handcrafting a playlist typically involves the tedious process of searching through a large content library to find appropriate content items, selecting the content items, selecting an order for the content items and hoping that no desirable content items are overlooked. Current technologies enable users to automatically generate a playlist based on common factors, such as genre, artist, album, popularity and the like. While simple and fast to create, these automatically generated playlists select content individually without taking into consideration how the content items fit together and whether they will create a cohesive playlist that flows well from one content item to the next in a manner that is pleasant for the user. As a result, automatically generated playlists may include content items that the user likes, however result in a poor playlist when put together.